Aho confessionand bookkeeping thereligious,moral,andrhetoricalrootsofmodernaccounting.[2005] suny-press

Bookkeeping
The Religious, Moral, and
Rhetorical Roots of
Modern Accounting
James Aho
Confession
and

C O N F E S S I O N
A N D
B O O K K E E P I N G

This page intentionally left blank.

C O N F E S S I O N
A N D
B O O K K E E P I N G
The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots
of Modern Accounting
James Aho
State University of New York Press

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2005 State University of New York
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Printed in the United States of America
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without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a
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For information, address State University of New York Press,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aho, James Alfred, 1942–
Confession and bookkeeping : the religious, moral, and rhetorical roots of modern
accounting / James Aho.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-6545-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Bookkeeping—History. 2. Accounting—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Capitalism—
Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Economics—Religious aspects—Catholic Church—History. 5.
Christian sociology—Catholic Church—History. I. Title.
HF5635.A265 2005
657'.2'09—dc22
2004027565
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my father-in-law,
John W. McMahan

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xix
1. The Problem 1
2. Roman Catholic Penance 13
3. The “Scrupulous Disease” 23
4. Business Scruples 31
5. Medieval Morality and Business 43
6. The Notary-Bookkeeper 55
7. The Rhetoric of Double-entry Bookkeeping 63
8. Confession and Bookkeeping 81
Appendix 95
Notes 99
References 107
Index 121
vii
Contents

In American business schools, accounting is treated primarily
as “accountingization” (Power and Laughlin, 1992), that is,
as a body of technically refined calculations used by organi-
zations to efficiently accomplish goals such as profit maxi-
mization. What, if any, theory that is taught reduces largely
to cybernetics and systems theory, approaches eerily detached
from the lived-realities of those organizations, even as their
recommendations profoundly influence the solidarity, morale,
productivity, creativity, and health of those who work in
them. As for standard histories of the profession, these are
progressivist and functionalist. They reiterate with minor
variations a narrative first announced by A. C. Littleton,
namely, that since its inception in the fourteenth-century
accounting has evolved from “bookkeeping fictions” into
“scientific facts” (Littleton, 1933).
For its part the sociology of organizations, which has
always had a fond place in its heart for the vibrant underlife of
bureaucracies, has become increasingly blind to accounting
procedures, which it happily relegates to technical experts. This
is a bizarre development indeed, considering that the putative
godfather of organizational sociology, Max Weber, essentially
defined bureaucracy in terms of modern bookkeeping (Col-
ignon and Covaleski, 1991: 142–43).1
Richard Colignon and
Mark Covaleski attribute organizational sociology’s ignorance
of accounting to its even more glaring inability to see the zero-
sum power relationships that characterize modern corpora-
tions. In functionalist organizational theory, domination trans-
lates into the innocuous, smiley-faced concept of “leadership,”
and accounting is treated as simply another technology that
promotes benign societal ends (153–54).
ix
Preface

A sea-change is now upsetting these academic traditions.
Since the early 1990s in the rare and secret precincts where the
humanities meet management, European and American
accounting theorists have begun writing from a critical histori-
cal perspective. Inspired in part by Michel Foucault’s idea of
“governmentalism”—a convoluted neologism referring to the
social control of minds and bodies—they are challenging the
socially decontextualized “technocratic pretensions,” as one
has called them, of their profession (Power and Laughlin,
1992). Following their own independent introduction to Fou-
cault, sociologists have begun reciprocating the gesture, warily
reaching out their hands in greeting to their long-lost cousins
(cf. Carruthers and Espeland, 1991). Voilà! A critical sociology
of accounting is born.
From the standpoint of this emerging interdisciplinary
dialogue, accounting is no longer considered only a revelation
of the financial realities of an organization. Instead, it is seen as
constitutive of that organization’s very being. That is to say,
accounting is coming to be understood as “making” the very
things it pretends to describe, including—through its estimates
of equities and assets—a firm’s boundaries (Morgan and Will-
mott, 1993; Hines, 1988). Accounting does this by posing
aspects of organizations in monetary terms, disclosing them as
“good hard facts.” As this occurs, “softer” qualitative factors
become irrelevant; in the end, invisible. Accounting procedures
establish organization “targets” like the “bottom line” and
provide monitoring systems to assess department and personal
“outcomes.” “Deadwood” is exposed, “rising stars” identified;
recommendations are made as to “merit increases” and the
infliction of “force reductions.” In these ways accounting dis-
courages certain behaviors and investments in certain organi-
zational sectors, while it simultaneously encourages and pro-
motes others.
By compelling workers to attend to organizational “dead-
lines” and performance “quotas,” accounting alters workers’
experiences of the procession of events. The speed of lived-time
accelerates (Gleick, 1999). Postures rigidify, gait becomes more
urgent; skeletal structures and organ function adapt accord-
x Preface

ingly; health and longevity are affected (Bertman, 1999). What
this implies is that far from being a morally and politically neu-
tral enterprise, accounting by its very nature is political: not
merely a power tool deployed by elites to aggrandize them-
selves, which is true enough; but a technology of domination
in-itself; a technology legitimized by the ideology of efficiency.
Under the banner of efficiency (cost-effectiveness, profit,
etc.) accounting calculations have come to colonize themselves
in virtually every institutional realm of modern society from
sports, education, and criminal justice, to health-care, war-
making, and even religion. The vocabulary of efficiency has
been elevated into the “distinctive morality” of our times
(Miller and Napier, 1993: 645). Domination has assumed a
presumably humane, scientific face; the old forms of coercion
have disappeared. Today, each actor wants to do, and freely
chooses to do, precisely what efficiency experts recommend.
And what they earn from the organization that employs them
is mathematically proven to be exactly what they deserve.
᪌᪍
A critical sociology of accounting bases itself on four convic-
tions. The first is that “any way of seeing is also a way of not
seeing” (Morgan and Willmott, 1993: 13). In other words,
every account of an organizational world, like every set of tinted
lenses, highlights some aspects of that world while it veils oth-
ers, rendering them invisible. Second, it assumes that even the
most rational ways of seeing, thinking, and recalling events—of
which quantitative accounts are the preeminent example—may
in other respects be diabolically unreasonable. That is, they may
promote dysfunctional actions, actions that confute the ostensi-
ble goals of the organization they report on. This, by distorting
information flows, legitimizing incompetency, and inadvertently
fostering resistances (Hopwood, 1983: 292–93). A third con-
viction of a critical sociology of accounting, is that its task is not
to be the reification of selected accounting narratives, to make
them appear universal, natural, reasonable (and thus irre-
sistible). It is instead to destabilize them, to problematize them,
to disturb them (Miller and O’Leary, 1987), or if one prefers, to
destrukt them (to use Martin Heidegger’s more pithy word), so
xiPreface

that they can be actively chosen instead of passively suffered.
Fourth, it does this by exhibiting that accounting schemes are
socially contrived, culturally relative, and historically contin-
gent. To say it in another way, it conducts what Foucault (after
Nietzsche) calls “genealogy”: showing that what is experienced
as a natural fact—such as the quest for precision and effi-
ciency—is in truth an art fact, an artifact, a social construct.
᪌᪍
This book on the moral and religious foundations of double-
entry bookkeeping (DEB) is offered as a humble contribution
to this four-pronged effort. It begins with the retrieval of a sim-
ple, ancient truth: “economics is sacred to the core” (Becker,
1975: 26). Consider the primitive custom known as the pot-
latch. In this, as in all competitions, participants strive to defeat
one another; not, however, by “getting the most” at each
other’s expense, but by giving it away (Mauss, 1954). Natu-
rally, there is a good bit of debate concerning the meaning of
this rite. But the consensus is that in surrendering what is most
precious and durable, the celebrants symbolically pay back a
debt, or they create obligations on the part of gift recipients. In
either case there is an unsaid, yet frank, appreciation of the
importance to the human psyche of keeping relations to nature,
to the gods, and to the community balanced. To whom much
has been given much shall be required, and he who gives much
shall receive a comparable amount in kind. Or, as expressed in
technical accounting jargon: For every credit there shall be an
equal and corresponding debit, and for every debit an equal
and corresponding credit. The sum of debits in properly kept
books always equates exactly with the summed credits.
While this, the distinguishing equation of DEB, acknowl-
edges an existential truth, evidently it was not formulated in
writing until early in the fourteenth century in Italy. This being
the case, the circumstances surrounding its written expression
constitute a fascinating problem in the sociology of knowledge
and, as it turns out, in the sociology of modern consciousness.
For just as twentieth-century accounting practices have abetted
the social creation of a particular form of governable person,
namely, the “efficient worker” (this, through IQ testing, men-
xii Preface

tal hygiene assessments, time-motion studies, and the manipu-
lative practice of negotiated budgeting [Miller and O’Leary,
1987]), DEB was itself complicit in the invention of a new
“field of visibility”: the Christian merchant. While this is a
taken-for-granted reality today, the very thought that a person
might be profit-hungry and yet Christian was an outrage to the
moral sensibilities of the Middle Ages. Furthermore, because
the “invention” of DEB was apparently pivotal in, if not solely
responsible for, the emergence of capitalism—an issue I take up
later—what might otherwise be considered a small chapter in a
minor, esoteric field becomes an archaeology of modern civi-
lization itself. Werner Sombart, whom we will soon meet more
formally, goes so far as to equate DEB with the modern sci-
ences of Galileo, Harvey, and Newton. “By the same means, it
[DEB] organizes perceptions into a system. . . . Without too
much difficulty, we can recognize in double-entry bookkeeping
the ideas of gravitation, of the circulation of the blood, and of
the conservation matter” (Most, 1976: 23–24). But here, a
clarification is in order.
I am not suggesting that DEB is modern accounting, a
claim still frequently implied by conventional accounting histo-
rians (Yamey and Parker, 1994). On the contrary, as accountin-
gization has dispersed itself through society, becoming a sort of
contemporary lingua franca, accounting technologies have
fragmented. Today, DEB is merely one of an imposing arsenal
of operations devised to aid people and organizations to pur-
sue their goals rationally and objectively (Miller and Napier,
1993). Nevertheless, even if DEB is not the basis for all of these
procedures, it was certainly the first to promise some degree of
mathematical control over organizational resources.
᪌᪍
The thesis informing this study is that analogous to the ancient
potlatch (and the recent advent of social and environmental
accounting), DEB arose from a sense of indebtedness on the
part of late medieval merchants toward creator, church, and
commune. Burdened with this debt, they felt compelled to cer-
tify in writing that for everything they earned something of
equal value had been returned, and that for everything meted
xiiiPreface

out something else was deserved. Many terms can be used to
enframe this sense of indebtedness: “finitude,” “limitedness,”
“creatureliness,” “animality,” “death consciousness,” “lack,”
“existential evil,” and “sin.” Since this last is the word that the
medieval mind itself typically employed to depict its state, I use
it here. To rephrase the preceding proposition, then: DEB arose
from a scrupulous preoccupation with sin on the part of the
faithful medieval entrepreneur. This, not the least because of
his dirty work: profiting from money-lending under question-
able circumstances in direct contravention of Church law. This
is to say, the medieval merchant found himself in a morally
problematic situation that necessitated that he justify himself
not only to ecclesiastical authorities, but to these authorities
internalized, the voice of his own conscience. To this end he
turned easily and naturally to the standard rhetorical models of
the day, producing what we now know as DEB. My argument
is not that DEB can be used to legitimize commercial activity:
a proposition that is now well-established (Carruthers and
Espeland, 1991; Gallhofer and Haslam, 1991; McClosky,
1986). It is that DEB was devised by modern Europe’s first
bookkeepers expressly to serve rhetorical ends.2
As to the question, what instilled in the merchant’s soul
such an overweening awareness of personal sin, my answer is:
the Roman Catholic sacrament of private penance, or as it is
popularly known, confession. Far from being coincidental, the
introduction of compulsory confession in 1215 and the appear-
ance of DEB soon thereafter are meaningfully, if not strictly
causally, related. The advent of communal chronicling, manor-
ial accounting, the family scrapbook, the personal diary, and so
forth, were all elements in a vast accounting enterprise that
arose near the end of the Middle Ages. Each in their own way
is an exhibit in a larger European project of moral improve-
ment, a project both stimulated by confession and reflected in it.
I am hardly the first to observe a theological component
in business record-keeping.3
It is widely acknowledged that his-
tory’s first business documents, preserved on clay tablets from
Mesopotamian city states (ca. 3000 BCE), concerned almost
exclusively temple purchases and disbursements (Oppenheim,
xiv Preface

1964: 231). In all of the major world religions, furthermore—
Zoorastrianism (Pahlavi Texts, part I, 30.4–33), Judaism
(Deut., 7.9–11), Islam (Qur’an, s. 17, v. 13), and Buddhism
(Tibetan Book of the Dead, 75)—divine judges keep ledgers on
their communicants. Following their deaths, the moral bal-
ances of each are said to be weighed in the scales of justice to
determine their fates in the hereafter. The Book of Revelations
in fact alludes to a kind of double-entry bookkeeping. Each
person’s credits and debits, we are told, are entered not just
once, but twice: first in the Book of Accounts, a judicial record
kept on earth by humanity, and again in the Book of Life, a reg-
ister of citizenship in the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev., 20.11–15).
All of this is to say nothing of medieval penitential literature
that abounds with references to a divine “Auditor” who hears
accounts. One can also find remarkably modern assertions like
the following, attributed to Pope Cyprian (252 CE): “The blood
of martyrs he [the penitent] can carry to his “credit” [in accep-
tum referre alicui], as the businessman can his gifts, interest
earnings, and gambling winnings” (Watkins, 1920: I, 209).
Nor did the conflation of business and moral/spiritual
accounting disappear after the Reformation. Far from it.
Methodist Church founder John Wesley, Daniel DeFoe, Samuel
Pepys, Baptist evangelicals, the deist Benjamin Franklin, the
Shakers, Harmony Society, and more recently, the Iona Com-
munity in Britain, all (have) insist(ed) that the keeping of metic-
ulous financial accounts is part and parcel of a more general
program of honesty, orderliness, and industriousness, which is
to say, of Protestant rectitude (Jacobs and Walker, 2000; Maltby,
1997; Walker, 1998; Weber, 1958: 124). Late eighteenth-century
bookkeeping instructors advised that
if the necessary regularity in keeping accounts is
observed; . . . a man call tell at one view whether his manner
of living is suited to his fortune, [and] he will consequently
be enabled to form a proper medium for adjusting his
expenses to his income, by which means he may be guarded
against . . . the evils of intemperance; from whence flow so
many vices. . . . (Yamey, 1949: 104–5)
xvPreface

Today, of course, at least in business, references to moral-
ity and religion in accounting are rare. Nonetheless, as the
recent Enron-Fannie Mae-Tyko-MCI-Global Crossing-Lucent-
Tenet Healthcare-WorldCom-RiteAid-Health South-Arthur
Anderson-Bristol Myers Squibb-Halliburton scandals demon-
strate, corporations continue to “cook” books to inflate prof-
its (or to hide them from tax collectors). Indeed, today it is
hard to remember that accounting is more than an exercise in
smoke and mirrors, the dubious profession of artful dodging
(Mitchell, Sikka, and Willmott, 1998). In other words, while
accounting may have forgotten its religious and moral roots, it
continues to have persuasive, rhetorical functions.
᪌᪍
Finally, a few comments on the epistemological status of this
study. Sociology has come a long way from presuming to
describe and explain the world from a position of omniscient
neutrality. Today, it is expected that practitioners of the disci-
pline reflexively apply the notions and ideas they impose on
others to themselves. For my purposes this means acknowledg-
ing that sociology is at heart a style—or more accurately,
styles—of storytelling (for unlike physics or biology there is no
grand narrative that all sociologists agree is worth relating). In
other words, sociology is an exercise in accounting, and like all
accounts it renders social reality in/visible, highlighting certain
facets of our lives together while blinding us to others. In the
following pages I elucidate the moral/rhetorical/religious com-
ponents of DEB, while remaining silent about its well-
researched financial utility in banking, or its connection to
printing technologies. Thus, while I hope mine is an engaging
story, one that inspires recognition, a reknowing of what was
already dimly perceived and thought, it makes no claims to be
the final word about an accounting format that has been so
important for all of us.
As just pointed out, accounts never just describe the
world. “In communicating reality, we construct reality”
(Hines, 1988). What, it may be asked, is the reality I wish to
accomplish here? It is, simply, to encourage a more pious,
thankful attitude toward the larger community, toward history,
xvi Preface

and toward the universe on the part of those who have enjoyed
its benefice. It is to help undermine a doctrine that has been ele-
vated into a virtual cant in our era, namely, that the highest
human virtue is selfishness (Rand, 1961) or, as posed in subtler
terms, “the only social responsibility of business is to increase
its profits” (Friedman, 1970). In other words, I want to pro-
mote in place of these popular dogmas a sense of grateful stew-
ardship and responsibility to a cosmos that makes profit—and
indeed, egotism itself—possible in the first place, by showing
that at one time gratitude was exactly the prevailing sentiment.
xviiPreface

The one person most responsible for this book being in print is
Kerry Jacobs, professor of accounting in the School of Business
at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. I had long given
up on the project when out of the blue Professor Jacobs (then
at Edinburgh University in Scotland) e-mailed me in spring
2003 requesting a copy of an article on medieval bookkeep-
ing—here, the basis of chapter 7—that had been published
eighteen years earlier. Jacobs wrote something to the effect that
he could hardly believe that any sociologist, much less an
American—American sociology has a less than vaunted repu-
tation in Europe—could or would study bookkeeping. I, in
turn, was astounded to learn that a business professor was con-
ducting ethnographic field research on, of all things, religious
orders. This shock was doubled when Jacobs informed me that
in Great Britain, the discipline of business administration had
appropriated Marxism, social linguistics, critical theory, and
Foucauldian sociology into its outlook. Thus began an intense
exchange of communications: Jacobs sending me extensive lists
of to-reads; I reciprocating with observations on his work. This
book has grown from interdisciplinary collaboration of the
best sort.
As for the original project, it emerged from conversa-
tions—not all of which I understood at the time—with my late
father-in-law, John W. McMahan, then an accountant for the
Atomic Energy Commission. To my knowledge at least, he was
the first recipient of the Ph.D. in accounting in America
(McMahan, 1939). His dissertation traces parallels between
the logic of modern bookkeeping and Thomistic philosophy. It
is the inspiration for, if not the thesis of, this book. In my per-
sonal library sits Dr. McMahan’s dog-eared, pencil-marked
xix
Acknowledgments

copy of what is still one of the most readable and comprehen-
sive social histories of accounting every written, that authored
by his major adviser, A. C. Littleton.
I could have accomplished little academically were it not
for the generosity and indulgence of my often befuddled col-
leagues at Idaho State University (ISU) (“What is he up to
now?”). Much of the initial research for this project, conducted
at the University of New Mexico, was undertaken with the help
of an ISU faculty research grant. My wife, poet Margaret Aho,
translated selections in Latin from several medieval home eco-
nomics textbooks.
I am grateful for permission to use parts of a previously
published article as a chapter in this book: “Rhetoric and the
Invention of Double Entry Bookkeeping.” Reproduced by per-
mission from the University of California Press from Rhetorica:
A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 3 (winter 1985): 21–43.
© International Society for the History of Rhetoric.
xx Acknowledgments

The conditions giving rise to rational bureaucratic capitalism,
or to what Max Weber calls “the most fateful force in modern
life” (Weber, 1958: 17), remain perennially interesting to social
historians. What follows is a sociology of one of its pivotal fea-
tures, double-entry bookkeeping (DEB). My object is to show
how this calculative practice emerged from the moral milieu of
the late Middle Ages; how Roman Catholic moral theology
insinuated itself into commerce via sacramental confession; and
how both commerce and morality were changed as a result:
morality becoming, as it were, commercialized (more accom-
modating to the merchant), and commerce “Christianized.”
I am not arguing that confession caused DEB in a mecha-
nistic way. Nor am I searching for the “origin” of DEB in
medieval business records, à la conventional accounting histo-
riography. Instead, I am concerned with weaving DEB into a
larger social/cultural context, showing how what appears to be
simply another mathematical technology once had great reli-
gious and moral significance.
In taking up this subject, I grapple with an argument first
advanced by Weber, and that eighty years later has become vir-
tually a dogmatic injunction in sociology, namely, that
Catholicism has been (and remains) a poor host to the forces
of economic change. By implication, I confirm the thesis pro-
mulgated by Weber’s not always friendly adversary, Werner
Sombart. Relying on his understanding—which Weber
rebuked as giving “a painful impression of superficiality”—of
Thomistic moral theology, Sombart shows that far from being
inimical to the rational pursuit of wealth, medieval Catholi-
cism actually encouraged it (Sombart, 1924; cf. Nussbaum,
1937). While historians (some of whom are cited later) have
1
C H A P T E R 1
The Problem

since tempered Weber’s argument, providing independent cor-
roboration of Sombart’s claim (cf. McGovern, 1970), with few
exceptions their findings have yet to penetrate the reaches of
popular sociology.1
This book addresses a subject that to my knowledge, at
least, few if any sociologists have ever addressed: accounting
procedures. As mentioned in the preface, structural functional-
ism and its stepchild, organizational sociology, traditionally
have displayed a blithe indifference to calculative technologies
in business, taking it for granted that “the formal rationality of
accounting, . . . is built into the nature of things, [as] the per-
fection of the means for achieving societal ends; ends which [to
them] are self-evident[ly]” valid and good (Colignon and
Covaleski, 1991: 153). Richard Colignon and Mark Covaleski
suggest that this complacency grows from the politically com-
promised status of functionalists and organizational sociolo-
gists as research handmaidens to corporate management. How-
ever this may be, the following pages are intended as a
corrective to this bias. It problematizes what heretofore has
been passed over with silence by my own discipline.
Weber and Sombart on Penance
The narratives of Weber and Sombart occupy a middle range
between abstract theory and particularism. Instead of
attempting to derive economic activity from the ideal-typical
(read: nonexistent) utility maximizer, or of remaining at a
purely descriptive level, both seek to trace the psyche of the
medieval merchant back to a specific institutional setting, the
workings of which are susceptible to indirect observation.
And for both of them, the locus out of which the late
medieval mind is presumed to have arisen is the sacrament of
penance. The Weber-Sombart controversy, as inherited by us,
revolves around their conflicting interpretations of the mean-
ing of this ritual for its participants.
To Weber, it was the “sacrament of absolution,” as he
calls it, which explains why “inner-worldly asceticism,” the
2 Confession and Bookkeeping

heart of the “capitalist spirit” (a term I discuss later) allegedly
failed to flourish in the Catholic world. Sombart disagrees. It
was precisely this sacrament, he submits, which nurtured an
incipient capitalist spirit in Catholic lands; a spirit which, when
implanted in the fertile soil of the Italian trading centers, burst
into history’s first modern business enterprises.
In his sociology of religion, Weber distinguishes between
the systematic effort by the individual to secure his or her own
salvation on the one hand, and the distribution grace through
“magical sacraments” on the other, wherein devotees are rele-
gated to passively observing the manipulations of priests. In
Protestantism, where the first salvific technique prevails, radi-
cal ethical conversion—today’s so-called born again experi-
ence—is common. In Catholicism, by contrast, where the sec-
ond form predominates, “the level of personal ethical
accomplishment must . . . be made compatible with average
human qualifications,” which is to say, “quite low” (Weber,
1963: 151–53). According to Weber, the Catholic “priest was a
magician of sorts who performed the miracle of transubstanti-
ation and who held the key to eternal life in his hand. . . . He
dispensed atonement, hope of grace, certainty of forgiveness,
and thereby granted release from the tremendous tension to
which the Calvinist was doomed by an inexorable fate, admit-
ting of no mitigation . . .” (1958: 117).
Although, he continues, the distribution of grace in
Catholicism could in principle have encouraged ascetic rigor
(were its reception made contingent upon the recipient publicly
demonstrating their virtue), the sacrament of penance rendered
this unnecessary. This is because instead of magnifying the
believer’s sense of personal responsibility for wrongdoing, it
mollified it, sparing him or her the necessity of developing a
planned pattern of life based on the Decalogue.
With his acute sensitivity to detail, Weber admits that this
characterization “in a certain sense” does “violence to histori-
cal reality.” He nonetheless insists that apart from the monas-
tic orders (Weber, 1958: 118–19), the heterodox teachings of
Duns Scotus (235, n. 76), and the pre-Reformation sects of
Wyclif and Hus (198, n. 12), the “normal medieval Catholic
3The Problem

layman lived ethically, so to speak from hand to mouth,” in
“the very human cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release,
followed by renewed sin” (117). In any case, whatever asceti-
cism St. Ignatius, the monks of Cluny, the Cistercians, or the
Franciscans practiced, it was not undertaken to reform the
world, à la Calvinism, but to flee from it altogether.2
Sombart disputes this. “The capitalist spirit,” he says,
“first manifested itself in Renaissance Italy,” approximately
two centuries before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the
door of Castle Church in 1517. And this spirit reached its
apogee in the Tuscan republics, of which the city-state of Flo-
rence was the most important. In answer to the question, why?
he replies that Florentine merchants not only were influenced
by classical philosophers like Cicero, Seneca, and Livy; more
importantly, they were devoted Catholics. “The origins of cap-
italism made their appearance at a time when the Church held
sway over men’s minds . . .” (Sombart, 1967: 228–29). And “it
is of supreme interest to note that religious zeal was nowhere
so hot and strong as in Florence” (229).
Finally, we must not forget how mighty a weapon the
Catholic Church possessed in the confessional. . . . We must
suppose that the businessman discussed with his father-con-
fessor the principles that governed his economic activities.
Do we not know that numerous treatises were written, advis-
ing the clergy how to guide their flocks in all that affects life,
even to the minutest detail? (230–31)
The issue is thus squarely posed. Either the sacrament of
penance inhibited a lifestyle conducive to rational bureaucratic
acquisition or it did not. This book intends to help resolve this
dispute once and for all. Which is not to say that as they stand,
either Weber’s or Sombart’s views are immune from criticism. On
the contrary, knowledge of the actual dynamics and behavioral
consequences of penance seems to have remained for both largely
a mystery hidden behind the black curtains of the confessional
booth. Indeed, to the ordinary Catholic their depictions of con-
fession appear stereotypical to the point of banality. Take Weber.

Weber claims that all of the essentials of Catholic sacra-
mental life, including confession, “have been fixed since the
time of Gregory the Great” (reigned 590–604 CE) (Weber,
1963: 188). We now know that this is incorrect. True, in his
acute awareness of the pastoral needs of penitents Gregory
appears to have anticipated something on the lines of confes-
sion. But he was addressing a ritual technically known as
Mediterranean or canonical penance, which is fundamentally
different from the sacrament of confession that is my interest in
these pages. As we shall see momentarily, the roots of confes-
sion are to be found in Celtic monastic life, not in Roman
courtrooms; it was not recognized in Church law until six cen-
turies after Gregory’s death.
That Weber is not completely unaware of the evolution
from canonical penance to confession is suggested by his ref-
erence to the penitential handbooks that were routinely cited
by priests hearing confessions to estimate punishments for
sins. However, he dismisses their importance by viewing
them merely as efforts to “combine the techniques of Roman
law with the Teutonic conception of fiscal expiation
(wergild)” (Weber, 1963: 190). This view has since been
thoroughly rejected as a result of detailed examination of
passages from these handbooks. Chapter 2 discusses some of
the relevant findings.
Sombart is also guilty of oversights regarding penance
that have led him astray. To begin with, the “numerous trea-
tises” to which he refers in the previous quotation, evidently
are not the penitential handbooks, which unlike Weber he
seems unacquainted with, but various summa theologica and
morale of three Church doctors: Thomas Aquinas (c. 1274),
Antonino of Florence (d. 1459), and Bernardino of Siena (d.
1444) (Sombart, 1967: 383, n. 278). To justify his choice of
these names, Sombart points out that besides their all being
Italian (although Aquinas spent his career in Paris), these
were not “mild bookworms unlearned in the ways of the
world, abstruse thinkers of the cloisters and the study,
engaged in hair-splitting and endless repetitions concerning
unrealities” (243–44). This is true, but irrelevant. The fact is
5The Problem

that Bernardino and Antonino both not only wrote long after
Italian capitalism was already flourishing; they were canon-
ized and popularized much later than this. It would hardly be
logical, then, to attribute causal influence to their teachings
on the behavior of those who lived a century before their
time. The case of St. Thomas, of course, is different. He was
canonized in 1323, and his theology became sacrosanct in
Dominican orders around the very time that DEB was first
being introduced (i.e., ca. 1340). However, as recent studies
have shown, it is a grave mistake to rely on formal theologi-
cal treatises to draw pictures of lay behavior. Even conceding
that St. Thomas indirectly might have influenced economic
affairs during his life, as to the direct use of his writings (or
those of any other scholastic) in confession: this was even less
likely in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than it is
today. This, for no other reason than they were disseminated
in Latin for university audiences, not in the vernacular for
common folk. The available evidence indicates that it was the
penitential handbooks mentioned by Weber, not theological
texts, which were employed by pastors in confession; these
typically are devoid of any moral theorizing whatsoever.
Instead, they consist of highly stylized, easily memorizable
injunctions and interrogatory devices.
While Weber and Sombart both attempt to situate the
medieval economic ethos in a specific institutional matrix, the
inference leaps that they make from moral teachings to busi-
ness practices are best heroically gymnastic; at worst they are
unconvincing. It takes a particularly astute reader of The
Protestant Ethic, for example, to bridge the gap between
Weber’s discussion of John Calvin (who profoundly mistrusted
material acquisition), his treatment of the Reverend Richard
Baxter’s seventeenth-century homilies (which endorse the con-
nection between wealth and virtue), and the content of the
worldly deist Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Young Trades-
man. The links that Sombart draws between Thomistic theol-
ogy and capitalist values are even less persuasive. Sombart
argues that Thomism penetrated Italian commerce through
advice proffered in various scrapbooks kept by prominent Flo-

rentine and Venetian families (Sombart, 1967: 375–76, n. 141).
The most famous of these was Leon Battista Alberti’s Del Gov-
erno della Famiglia (1443), “a classic in its own time.” In its
celebration of thrift as holy, says Sombart, it anticipates Ben-
jamin Franklin and Daniel DeFoe both in substance and in
form (101–14). Weber (I think, correctly) repudiates Sombart
for “seriously misinterpreting” the meaning of the scrapbooks
for their audiences. He points out that for all Alberti’s advo-
cacy of industriousness, scheduling, and the keeping of
accounts, in reality he shunned acquisition beyond what would
be necessary to maintain one’s social position. The pursuit of
wealth for Alberti, in other words, was not a religious calling
as it allegedly was for the Calvinist.3
More to the point, Alberti
cites the pagan philosophers Cicero, Horace, and Xenophon to
justify his fatherly preachments, more than he does any Church
dogmatist. St. Thomas, for example, is never mentioned. How
Alberti’s Christian faith actually bore on his practical advice if
it did at all, then, remains an open question.
What this all adds up to is a need to reexamine the lived-
world of the medieval denizen: not from the outside, but anal-
ogous to Weber’s own incomparable phenomenology of the
Calvinist psyche; from the inside, from the viewpoint of the
medieval merchant himself. To accomplish this will require
more than merely depicting how the moral teachings of con-
fession bore upon the merchant (as important as this is), as
Sombart does (however poorly). It will also be necessary to
ponder on how the ritual of the sacrament itself was conducted
and how its procedures might have impacted the medieval soul.
These are my intentions.
Weber and Sombart on Accounting
Weber and Sombart both claim that the introduction of DEB
was essential for the emergence of modern capitalism. Indeed,
Weber goes so far as to define modern capitalism in terms of
DEB. A modern firm is “one with capital accounting, that is,
an establishment which determines its income yielding power
7The Problem

by calculation according to the methods of modern bookkeep-
ing and the striking of balance” (Weber, 1950: 275; 1947,
50–51; 1958, 21–22). Sombart concurs with this, saying that
“one can not imagine what capitalism would be without dou-
ble-entry bookkeeping: the two phenomena are connected as
intimately as form and contents” (Sombart, 1924: 118). DEB
operationalizes the idea of economic gain in terms of a specific
quantity, namely, money; and it allows a firm to trace its finan-
cial progress over time, enabling its owners to adjust their
behavior in response to changing market circumstances. It also
allows them to calculate the overall assets of the business, its
obligations to creditors, and to determine dividend shares to
partners on a basis proportional to their contributions.
The foremost historian of the subject, Basil Yamey (1949,
1964), among others (e.g., Winjum, 1970; Most, 1972; Car-
ruthers and Espeland, 1991) considers the Weber/Sombart
assertions to be “greatly exaggerated.” As we shall see in chap-
ter 3, the recommendations of period textbooks indicate that
while DEB could be deployed in such a way as to promote
rational decision-making, more likely it was used primarily to
insure that business records were complete and accurately kept,
period. Nonetheless, even Yamey and others agree that DEB
always harbored the potential to do the things attributed to it
by Weber and Sombart. And just what are these things?
Acquisitiveness, Weber argues, is universal. Even ratio-
nally mediated earning or capitalism proper, where each act is
predicated upon the probability of maximizing profit, was
well-known in precolonial India, the ancient Mediterranean,
the Muslim world, and China. What distinguishes modern
profit-making from more primitive species of the phenomenon
are two things: the separation of business from the home and
capital accounting: the “. . . valuation of the total assets of the
enterprise, . . . at the beginning of an [accounting period]; and
the comparison of this with a similar valuation . . . at the end
of the process” (Weber, 1947: 191–92).
Weber goes on to attribute the introduction of capital
accounting to a “capitalist spirit.” This, instead of explaining
it as a product exclusively of material and technical circum-

stances—for instance, algebra, the number naught, joint part-
nerships, and money exchanges. By capitalist spirit he means a
culturally specific way of being in the world; an emotional and
cognitive habit of formal rationality, Zweckrationalitat,
wherein different means to an end are weighed in terms of their
respective costs (the closest English equivalent is “utilitarian-
ism”). He contrasts this mind-set with substantive, ends-orien-
tated rationality (Wertrationalitat) in which, regardless of its
costs, any action is considered appropriate if it serves a partic-
ular end (Weber, 1947: 115, n. 38).
Sombart agrees with Weber that the crucial generative fac-
tor of modern accounting was ideational. Furthermore, while
he poses his discussion in somewhat looser terms than Weber,
he insists that what is distinctive to the capitalist spirit is not its
“silken woof,” the desire for monetary gain, but its “cotton
warp,” the predisposition to earn money in a “bourgeois” way
(Sombart, 1967: 22), that is, by means of calculative exactness
(Rechenhaftigkeit). This is “the tendency, the habit, perhaps
more—the capacity to think of the universe in terms of figures,
and to transform these figures into a well-knit system of
income and expenditure” (125). While the Protestant burgher
of England, Germany, and the Netherlands definitely exempli-
fied this characterology, says Sombart (once more agreeing
with Weber), so did the late medieval (Catholic) Italian mer-
chant. As to the question, why? Sombart invokes what Weber
dismisses as “a thesis in the worst sense.” The Italian merchant
class, says Sombart, was bourgeoisified through its participa-
tion in the primary agency of Catholic moral discipline, the
sacrament of penance.
It is not necessary to restate the objections to Sombart’s
argument. As one of his biographers notes, although Der Mod-
erne Kapitalismus is “an exciting and challenging book, valid
facts and unreliable information stand side by side in liaisons
dangereuses” (Kuczynaski, 1968). It is enough to say that my
purpose in this book is to expand on and enrich Sombart’s
proposition without stumbling into the same pitfalls.
As for the errors in Weber’s history of DEB, these are not
just dangerous (as they are with Sombart); they are deadly.
9The Problem

This, because they reinforce the basis of his entire argument
that within the Christian cosmos only Protestantism could have
sired modern capitalism.
To support his contention, Weber cites the “Dutch the-
orist Simon Stevin” as the person who “first insisted
upon . . . the device of the balance” in 1698 (Weber, 1950:
207). Ignoring the fact that Stevin died in 1620, it is now
commonly acknowledged that DEB and the drawing of bal-
ance were in use two centuries prior to the Reformation, and
then in the Catholic cities of Florence, Genoa, and Venice
(Cohen, 1980: 1345–47). In fact the first textbook on the
subject, which Stevin himself draws upon, was authored by
none other than a Franciscan monk; a book written several
decades before Stevin was born. In other words, far from
being a product of the Calvinist spirit, DEB emerged from
the culture of the high Middle Ages, when through her sacra-
mental regulation of the total life course of the individual,
Roman Catholicism dominated the European psyche as
never before.
How Weber could have committed such a grave error in
regard to the dating of DEB is a matter for others to deter-
mine. For one thing, the Massari ledgers of Genoa (dated ca.
1340), which provide the first bona fide example of DEB, were
not made available (and then in Italian) until 1909, five years
after first installment of The Protestant Ethic was published.
Yet, Weber’s own doctoral dissertation plainly reveals that he
had carefully gone over the books of two prominent Floren-
tine family businesses, those of the Alberti and the Peruzzi
(Weber, 2003: 160–66). There, he notes that while the ledgers
are presented “in a dilettante way,” they show how interest on
loans to partners were accounted for and how, every two
years, shares of the companies’ profits were meted out in pro-
portion to the partners’ equity shares of capital. In other
words, by his own admission, the accounts demonstrate that
the families’ bookkeepers were able to “calculate according to
the methods of modern bookkeeping” which, as we just saw,
Weber considers the sine qua non of modern capitalism.
(Weber fails to mention whether or not the ledger items were

posted dually. Those in the Alberti books probably were; those
of the Peruzzi’s, however, were not [Roover, 1958: 33–34].)
The point, however, is not to decry Weber’s oversight or con-
tradiction, whatever its source; it is to correct it. This is my
goal in the pages to follow.
11The Problem

History
Virtually from the moment of its founding, Christianity has
endorsed the practice of penance both for the debasement of
self and its purification. Not until 1215, however, under the
auspices of Pope Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council,
did a particular kind of penance, this involving the confession
of one’s sins to a priest, become law. Up to this time the rec-
ognized, if rarely used, penitential rite was known as canoni-
cal penance. This did not involve the divulgence of sins so
much as the conferral of a status, excommunication, which
was grudgingly granted by bishops upon request by candidates
themselves. Canonical penance was permitted only once after
baptism, and for reasons listed in the following section it was
usually undertaken only by the exceptionally religious (or
exhibitionistic).
To be sure, the Church was already employing a kind of
private consultation with priests for therapeutic (as opposed
to strictly salvific purposes) as early as the third century
(Tentler, 1977: 20–21). But not until the fifth and sixth cen-
turies is there evidence of a confessional ceremony for the
absolution of sins proper. And this is found not in the Christ-
ian heartland of continental Europe, but in Celtic monasteries
lying on the western reaches of the civilized world (Watkins,
1920: II, 578–632; McNeill, 1932b).1
It was the Celtic rite
that the Fourth Lateran Council would recognize as compul-
sory for all believers, on pain of being “barred from entrance
to the church” while alive, and “when dying . . . [of being]
deprived a church burial” (Denzinger, 1957: 173, sec. 437;
Watkins, 1920: II, 733–34, 748–49).
13
C H A P T E R 2
Roman Catholic Penance

The handbooks used in the original Celtic confessional
betray the influence of the so-called pillar saints and desert
fathers of the ancient Syrian Church. The regimens of the latter
in turn presumably are traceable to the influence of Hinduism
(McNeill and Gamer, 1938: 3). (The period of Hindu cultural
expansion in the Near East [ca. 320–570 CE] took place coter-
minous with the rise of Christian monasticism; it is worth not-
ing that the Gaelic word amnchara [spiritual director] has the
same root as the Sanskrit acharya.) It was also in Syrian monas-
teries where medical metaphors, later used by Irish confessors to
prescribe medicamenta for sins, were first introduced.
Whatever its alleged sources, Celtic penance involved the
submission of a novice to an older “soul friend.” To this were
wedded sometimes brutal injunctions from Canon Law and the
Celtic folkway of compensation (eric), including mind-numb-
ing recitations of psalms (which John McNeill and Helena
Gamer compare to the penitential singing of the Brahmana
codes in Hinduism [McNeill and Gamer, 1938: 27]), sleep
deprivation by means of cold-water baths, stinging nettles,
being placed in a coffin with a corpse, being scantily clad in
frigid weather, flagellation, fasting on bread and water, solitary
confinement, and in the most serious cases, exile (30–35).
After its appearance in the Celtic world, private penance
spread rapidly to Burgundy, Lombardy, and Switzerland (by
650 CE), to Saxon England (by 670 CE), and to Germany by the
end of the first millennium. By the eighth century there is men-
tion of persons of high rank having their own private confes-
sors. Some bishops, sensing a challenge to their monopoly to
absolve sins, railed against the procedure as “play-acting
inanity, which carnal men presume to sanction” (Poschmann,
1964: 139; cf. 131–34). They defamed the penitential hand-
books used in confession as “filled with errors and composed
by unworthy authors” (Orsy, 1978: 43). In 829 CE the Council
of Paris went so far as to order the books burned, but it was
too late. The futility of resisting such a popular custom had
become evident already to most Church authorities.
Among the reasons for the enthusiastic reception of con-
fession was that canonical penance (the earlier rite) had fallen

into ill-fame and had practically disappeared by the ninth cen-
tury. This is because while its object had been to promote
moral discipline, its very rigors—which included a decade long
excommunication, complete abstinence, the donning of hair
shirts and ashes, the forswearing of marriage, public office, and
the priesthood—tended to encourage the opposite. While an
exemplary few might use the rite to theatrically display their
piety before the congregation, the average believer tended to
avoid it as long as possible, sometimes until the deathbed itself.
As early as the fifth century, Pope Innocent I (reigned
401–77 CE) was conceding that under the auspices of the
canonical rite it was possible for a person to “have surrendered
on every occasion to the pleasures of incontinence, and at the
end of their lives ask for [absolution] . . . meanwhile [continu-
ing to enjoy] the reconciliation of communion” (Denzinger,
1957: 41: sec. 95).
McNeill believes that apart from Hindu asceticism, the
precursor of Celtic penance was Greek medicine (McNeill,
1932b, 1934). The penitential handbook authored by Finnian
(ca. 525 CE) announces it clearly: The object of confession is
not to punish the penitent’s faults as much as it is to cure his or
her soul (cura animarum). He writes of sin as less an outward
act, than as an “illness” of which the act is a mere “symptom.”
As such, the penalties are not conceived as noxae vindicta in
the Roman sense, but as remedia or fomenta (poultices). (Later
commentaries would go so far as to attribute specific physical
diseases to their causes in immorality. Heart disease was said to
be due to pride, for example; frenzy to anger, leprosy to envy,
and epilepsy to lechery [Bloomfield,1952: 373].)
According to Finnian, the medicines prescribed by spiritual
physicians are not intended to punish outward acts after the fact,
but to quell inward thoughts. “Thought evil and intended to do
it, but opportunity failed him”; “has frequently entertained (evil)
thoughts and hesitated to act on them”; “has sinned in the
thoughts of his heart”; or “plotted in his heart”: all of these are
worthy of confession, he argues. For while they remain hidden
from the eyes of men, they are known to God (Finnian, 1938:
secs. 1–17). By the same token, while an outwardly wrongful act
15Roman Catholic Penance

may be regrettable, if it is committed without consciousness of
its immorality, is done under duress, or is an accident, the peni-
tent is counseled not to hold themselves blameworthy.
Although intentionality was acknowledged in the Celtic
penitentials, the theory behind it was not formulated until
much later. Indeed, as late as the twelfth century, Abbot
Bernard criticized the monks of Clairvaux for what he consid-
ered their narcissistic preoccupation with their own internal
states; he admonished them to focus on their remorse instead
on what they actually did. The turn toward a moral theology
of intentionality had to await the appearance of Abelard (d.
1142), the renown teacher and rather more infamous seducer
of the aristocratic maiden, Heloise (Delumeau, 1990: 197).
Abelard’s doctrine of intentionality affected European con-
sciousness in profound, largely unanticipated, ways. For it com-
pelled the average believer to begin exploring regions of their
own subjectivity that heretofore had been secreted in darkness
except for a minority of religious athletes. Irrespective of any
specific moral rules it promoted, in other words, it helped dis-
close a new range of visibility to the ordinary Christian, the
intricacies of their own souls. Just as the microscope would
soon reveal the cellular shadow-lands of corporeality, and the
telescope the outreaches of the universe (in both cases destabi-
lizing the received world), interior confession laid the ground-
work for the eventual appearance of what today is known as
depth psychology (Foucault, 1978: 68; Nelson, 1981: 49–54).
To be sure, Abelard’s rendering of confession was not the
only notion to prefigure the likes of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Freud, Adler, and Jung. The stoic philosopher, Seneca
(4 BCE–65 CE), to name just one, was recommending the daily
introspection of conscience (and the divulgence of such investi-
gations to one’s superior) as early as the time of Christ, over a
thousand years prior to the advent of penitential confession
(Foucault, 1988). However, there is little evidence that Seneca’s
teachings, or those of any other pagan thinker, had any direct
bearing either on confession or on modern psychology.
The bishop to whom one applied for penitential excom-
munication under the the ancient rite of canonical penance

was permitted mercy in his sentencing on the basis of his
knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the candidate’s
sins, including their state of mind. This is certain. But he was
not encouraged to be so; in any case, he was not so obliged by
law. This is a far cry from the immensely more psychologically
nuanced practice of Celtic penance. “Just as physicians of bod-
ies prepare their remedies in various sorts,” writes St. Colum-
ban, “so therefore spiritual physicians ought heal with various
sorts of treatments the sorrows, sicknesses and infirmities of
the soul” (Columban, 1938: secs. A-12 and B). St. Bede agrees:
“All are not to be weighed in one and the same balance but
there is discrimination for each [case] . . .” (McNeill, 1932b:
24). The father confessor is admonished to be acutely sensitive
to everything associated with the penitent’s acts: their number,
the perpetrator’s state of mind, their where and when, the
means of their commitment, and the victim’s status. Further-
more, he is urged to take into consideration the degree of con-
triteness exhibited by the penitent, their intelligence or lack
thereof, their past habits, age, gender, social rank, and even
health. After all, the father-confessor is not an impersonal
administrator of an abstract legal code, but a sympathetic
minister to wounded souls. And while an excess of lenience
may be insufficient to bring the penitent to a proper state of
guilt and shame, a ruthless application of severities may aggra-
vate their condition. In any case, “no physician can treat the
wounds of the sick unless he familiarizes himself with their
foulness” (23, cf. 25–26).
To be effectively treated, it was believed that moral infir-
mities had to be rebalanced by their contrary virtues: Con-
traria contrariis sanantur (contraries are cured by contraries).
Here is glimpsed the most obvious influence of Greek medi-
cine on confession. For the Greek physicians Methodius and
Hypocrites also held that robust health entails an equilibrium
of sorts between hot and cold fluids, moist and dry vapors,
angry and placid moods, and so on. So “if a cleric is cov-
etous,” advises Finnian, “it can be corrected by liberality and
alms-giving” (Finnian, 1938: secs. 28 and 29). And if, agrees
St. Columban, he suffers from gluttony, then let him be cured

by fasting; if lust, then by abstinence; if envy, by restraint of
tongue (Columban, 1938: secs. A-12 and B; cf. McNeill and
Gamer, 1938: 321–45).
It is likely that the theory of Greek medicine was received
by ancient Syrian monks through their work in hospitals. One
account claims that it was subsequently broadcast to Celtic
brothers via the itinerant monk, John Cassian (ca. 360–434 CE)
(Mitchell, 1955: 11–12; McNeill, 1932b: 16–19). Cassian is
also credited for introducing to Irish penance the idea of the
seven (or eight, depending on one’s reading) deadly sins, each
of which is said to arise from the preceding and to lead to the
next (Bloomfield, 1952: 69–72). Cassian depicts pride (super-
bia) as “the fountainhead of all evil,” or to use a more colorful
metaphor, the “beast” who “captains the devil’s army.” From
it the others—envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust—
follow in “military order.” Each sin in turn is divided into its
“children” or “species,” and each of these graded in terms of
their seriousness. This system is found virtually unchanged in
penitential handbooks down to our time.
Dissemination
In the decades after 1215 few didactic devices were ignored by
the Church in her attempt to instill in the lay soul a sense of the
new sacrament, each adapted to the inclinations, needs, and
abilities of the audience (Delumeau, 1990: 198–211). First
came a spate of Dominican summa pastoralis, confessorum,
and casibus (casuistry) (Michaud-Quantin, 1962: 15–43).
Then, following the death of Thomas Aquinas in 1274, a new
generation of manuals was devised, citing earlier cases and ana-
lyzing new ones in light of the opinions of doctores moderni
(Boyle, 1974: 245–68). With the formal treatises appeared an
even greater number of abbreviated vernacular versions for use
by pastors in confession (Dondain, 1937; Simmons and Nol-
loth, 1901; MacKinnon, 1969; Page, 1976). Soon thereafter
came numerological devices to aid penitents in composing
complete confessions (Francis, 1968 [1942]; Dondain, 1937:

10–11, 217–18) and prepackaged homilies citing legendary
authorities, illustrated with moral anecdotes of local interest
(Wenzel, 1976). There were moralized picture-stories of the
seven major sins and their “whelps,” “retainers,” and “poiso-
nous serpents” for use as mnemonic devices (Wilson, 1954:
54–64, 83–87; Bloomfield, 1952: 76–84, 103, 249). There
were even catchy songs and ditties (Clark, 1905; Thompson,
1940: 257–58; MacKinnon, 1969: 40–45). According to
Thomas Tentler, the sheer mass and variety of penitential liter-
ature “proves its intellectual significance.” It was, he says, the
most frequently mentioned and widest read material in Chris-
tendom prior to the sixteenth century (Tentler, 1977: 28–51;
Bloomfield, 1955).2
A Penitential Ditty
The seuen deadly synnes I can not excuse:
For I am gylty, in many man or wise,
With delectation, consente, and use;
Al now to reherse I may not suffyse;
In pryde, enuye, wrath, lechery & covetyse,
Sleuth, and glotony, with all her spices,
Alas! Al my life is full of vices.
From Clark, 1905: part 1, lines 162–68.
It is the vernacular texts that concern me here, for it is
they that directly influenced the average churchgoer. Allowing
for differences in format, style, and language, all of them insist
on the following points.3
Penance is required of all believers
beyond the age of discretion (ca. 12) at least once a year, prefer-
ably more often. This, with a priest not necessarily of their own
parish. It consists of three parts: contrition, confession proper,
and satisfaction. Contrition involves a painstaking “examina-
tion and recollection” by the penitent of their past. In it they
are to reflect on the “gravity of [their] sins, [their] multitude,
[and their] baseness.” Contemplating the likelihood of eternal
damnation if they fail to do so, the penitent must firmly resolve
to amend their ways. To this end, they are cautioned to be

“diligently exact” in their self-examination, “search[ing] all the
nooks and recesses of [their] conscience,” lest one mortal sin
escape purview. (Some handbooks recommend that if the con-
fessor appears unprepared in this regard, they should be
refused absolution.) After rehearsing their case, penitents must
approach the sitting priest and in the sight of all—the private
booth would come later—clearly, frankly, and humbly disclose
their sins; not, it must be emphasized, their “sins in general
only,” but “one by one,” according to their species and num-
ber, situating each in the circumstances that occasioned it. This
includes not only acts done in public and those in secret, but
“even those of thought.” (These generally include the seven
deadly sins and their “children,” those against the ten com-
mandments, those of the five senses, those against the three the-
ological virtues, the seven sacraments, the four cardinal virtues,
the seven gifts of the holy spirit, the eight beatitudes, and the
twelve articles of faith.) If any sin in thought or deed is con-
cealed whether out of despair, shame, fear, hope for a long life,
or forgetfulness, then it remains unforgiven. (Thus, the encour-
agement that confession be prompt and frequent). “For if one
who is ill is ashamed to make known his wound to the physi-
cian,” it cannot be treated. To facilitate full divulgence, the
priest is advised to discretely, but assertively interrogate the
penitent, without inadvertently teaching them new sins by his
choice of questions. (According to Tentler, “it seems hardly
possible,” to exaggerate the significance of the emphasis on
confessional completeness. It constitutes the “essential differ-
ence” between Roman Catholic penance and the more general
Protestant variation [Tentler, 1977: 91–101].) Following con-
fession, penance proper is prescribed as a “remedy against
infirmity.” The therapeutic element is emphasized. With skills
acquired from previous clinical “practice,” the priestly “sur-
geon” sensitively, but diligently, examines the “patient,”
inquiring both into their past habits and their present circum-
stances. Then, after diagnosing the patient’s condition they
“pour wine and oil” on the wound, using as a basis for treat-
ment observations of outcomes from past “experiments to save
the sick.”

There is, naturally, a good bit of controversy concerning
the frequency with which commoners actually availed them-
selves of confession. Given the shortage of priests with legal
authority to absolve sins, and the notorious clerical practice of
extorting “voluntary gifts” from penitents—sizes negotiable
beforehand—together with a human reluctance to display
one’s depravity before strangers, Tentler concludes that yearly
confession was probably the rule for the typical believer until
the fifteenth century (Tentler, 1977: 70–73, 78–79, 87–88).
But he concedes that it was always attended to when the pen-
itent was feared to be close to death, prior to major feast days,
or when one wished to receive the Eucharist, a practice rarer
in the medieval era than it is today (74). For their part, the
penitential handbooks recommend that confession be made as
often as conscience demands or as opportunity avails, includ-
ing daily confession if possible. However, there is no consen-
sus on this. In any case, mere frequency of participation in a
religious ritual is not necessarily the best measure of its psy-
chological significance.
Perhaps a more telling index of the salience of confession
are the countless references to it in lay literature: Chaucer’s
“Parson’s Tale” (composed ca. 1386–98), for example (Patter-
son, 1978); Dante’s Divine Comedy (1313–20), in which seven
of the ten divisions of the Mountain of Purgatory are given to
purging the seven deadly sins, each represented by a notorious
historical figure (Alighieri, 1958: 79–113); the Confessio
Amantis, authored by Chaucer’s colleague, John Gower
(1327–1408), consisting of a dialogue between himself and an
imaginary spiritual director, illustrating each of the seven sins
with examples taken directly from various penitential hand-
books (Gower, 1963); The Book of Margery Kempe (1436), a
fictionally embellished biography of a mystic’s struggle to
attain the unitive life, in which the heroine (who flourished ca.
1290) does “shrift” two to three times daily and finds herself
accused of still another sin, false humility (Butler-Dowdon,
1944); and William Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman, the
quest of Will and Conscience for Christian perfection, in which
the adventurers’ journeys are allegorized to the three steps of

sacramental penance: the House of Contrition, the Castle of
Confession, and the House of Penitence (Robertson and
Huppe, 1951). (In this and other pieces, including several of
Shakespeare’s plays, rapacious priest-wolves are depicted as
preying on sly, but largely defenseless, fox-laymen.) This item-
ization says nothing about the emphasis placed on regular con-
fession in period manuals on home economics: Walter of Hen-
ley’s Husbandry, Robert Grosseteste’s Rules (Lamond, 1890),
or above all, The Goodman of Paris (1340). In the latter, care
of the household is explicitly associated with care of one’s soul,
and this with regular confession to a spiritual “surgeon” to
whom “wounded men from day to day show their sores . . . to
gain speedy and fresh healing” (Power, 1928: 62).
What this all means is that the influence of the penitential
legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council was hardly limited to
ecclesiastical circles. On the contrary, through its ceremonial
procedures, as well as through the moral dictates it enforced,
confession deeply touched the medieval imagination. The con-
sequences for commercial record-keeping, to say nothing of
politics, military affairs, and sexuality, were immense. Let us
consider how this was so.

Moral Scrupulosity
Soon after confessional penance was made compulsory, reports
began to be sounded about a peculiar neurosis (as it would be
called today) exhibiting itself among the laity. By the end of the
thirteenth century, the occasional reports had exploded into an
“epidemic” (Delumeau, 1990: 1): Moral scrupulosity—an
overly exacting, paralyzing anxiety; a dread that even an off-
hand word, thought, or deed might, if undivulged to the priest,
be the one that occasions eternal damnation. (The term comes
from scrupulus, the smallest unit of Roman measurement [ca.
1/24 oz.].) The scrupulous soul kept meticulous records of their
morally suspect acts that they insisted on confessing weekly, if
not daily, in an increasingly frantic effort to escape God’s cen-
sure. The stated goal of the enterprise, of course, was to avoid
plunging at death into the fiery maw of Hell; its consequence
was sometimes to cripple the penitent’s ability to function
effectively in an ambiguous moral world.
Although as we shall soon see, scrupulosity by other
names was well-known long prior to his time, the official label-
ing of the condition is credited to St. Alphonsus of Liguori
(1696–1787). His characterization still provides the basis for
contemporary discussion. “(Scrupulosity is unrestrained appre-
hension) seeing evil where there is no evil, mortal sin where
there is no mortal sin, and obligations where there are no oblig-
ations” (Alphonsus, 1905: II, book 1, chap. 2). To this day,
scrupulosity remains one of the most formidable challenges for
the Catholic pastor; a small library has emerged to explain it
and to recommend solutions (Haering, 1963; Lasko, 1949;
Lord and O’Boyle, 1932; Ciarrocchi, 1995; Santa, 1999).
23
C H A P T E R 3
The “Scrupulous Disease”

A number of Catholic pastoral psychologists account for
scrupulosity by means of neo-Freudian concepts, arguing that
it is the consequence of an overactive superego, perhaps result-
ing from “fixation” at the so-called Oedipal stage of psycho-
sexual development. Implicit in this theory is the conviction
that obsession is a general symptomology, of which scrupulos-
ity is merely an accidental attribute. Were the patient not
Catholic, their obsessions would not disappear; they would
merely attach to another object.
In his own analysis of the subject, Bernard Haering argues
that with its devotion to hairsplitting technicalities, scrupulosity
(like its priestly variation, casuistry) evinces all the signs of a
“mass neurosis” in that it involves “legalistic fixation” and a
“helpless compulsive drive for spiritual security and certainty”
(Haering, 1963: 162–63). However, he fails to acknowledge the
possibility that confession itself inadvertently might aggravate
the condition. My suspicion, independently supported by the
exhaustive research of Jean Delumeau (1990: 296–303), is that
by forcing penitents’ attention away from concrete behaviors
(with discrete spatial and temporal limits) onto the unplumbed
depths of their inner worlds, confession probably entices more
than a few—specifically, those, as it would be said today, with-
out firm “ego boundaries”—off the precarious ledge of moral
security into the chasm of vertiginous subjectivity.
As Delumeau shows, long before confession was made
compulsory, there was already widespread conviction among
Christians concerning the fallen-ness of earth and of earthlings.
By the end of the first millennium, an entire literature of con-
temptus mundi had evolved to describe it (Delumeau, 1990:
9–17). Furthermore, a panoply of malevolent spirits were rou-
tinely cited to prove it. In addition to this, a cottage industry of
magic had been devised to avert their powers: para-liturgical
chants and blessings, set-apart precincts, and equipment: holy
water, the Virgin’s tears, the blood, hair, and body parts of
deceased saints, sacred shrouds, and the like (Kaebler, 1998:
101–25). What confession effected was the psychologizing of
contempt. Penitents were made to understand that decrepitude
did not just reside “out there” in the world; it inhabited the

deepest crevices of their own bodies, manifesting itself as blas-
phemous, wicked thoughts and cravings. Each Christian was
now positioned to experience themselves as “a demon clothed
in flesh” (to quote a period metaphor), as “a devil incarnate,”
or as a “sewer of iniquity,” whose “sins outnumber the hairs
on [their] head” (Delumeau, 1990: 1). By means of confession,
in other words, fear in the abstract transmogrified into fear of
one’s self.1
Whatever its causes, the epidemic of scrupulosity after
1300 calls into serious question the validity of Weber’s judg-
mental stereotype, alluded to in chapter 1, in which the
medieval Roman Catholic laity lived “ethically, so to speak,
from hand to mouth” in an emotionally impulsive, easygoing,
if episodically guilty, accommodation to the world. According
to his wife Marianne, Weber was accustomed to contrast this
“average” ethic” to the “heroic ethic” of the Calvinist whose
life is “a titanic struggle for perfection in the exertion of his
own powers,” “a fight to the death, . . . between ‘God’ and ‘the
devil’” (Marianne Weber, 1975: 155, 306, 322, 323, 364; cf.
Oakes, 1988–89: 84–87). The data before us here suggests that
the so-called Protestant Ethic in fact was flourishing in Europe
centuries prior to the advent of Protestantism itself.2
To be fair, Weber does acknowledge that some pre-Refor-
mation Catholics conducted moral bookkeeping of the sort
later endorsed by Protestant theologians. However, he dis-
misses the Catholic practice as having had an entirely different
motive than that of “the conscientious Puritan,” who sought to
“feel his own pulse with its aid.” The Catholic, Weber insists,
tabulated moral accounts merely to “serve the purpose of com-
pleteness of . . . confession, or [to give] the directeur de l’ame
a basis for his authoritarian guidance of the Christian (mostly
female)” (Max Weber, 1958: 124).3
I hope the discussion so far
and that to follow, both in this chapter and in chapter 4, unset-
tles this picture.
᪌᪍
Scrupulosity, by other names, was showing itself among clerics
as early as the fifth century. John Cassian, the Syrian monk
mentioned in chapter 2 as having played a preeminent role in
25The “Scrupulous Disease”

the introduction of confession to the West, seems to have
encouraged it. “We should,” he urged his fellows, “constantly
search all the inner chambers of our hearts . . . with the closest
investigations lest . . . some beast” furtively insinuate itself
“into the secret recesses of the heart.” Just as the miller metic-
ulously examines the quality of grain before admitting it to the
store, says Cassian, each believer in an effort to rid themselves
of their own noxiousness, must scrutinize their untoward
desires and thoughts, enumerate them in writing, and divulge
them daily to the abbot (Paden, 1988: 69–72).
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), having witnessed
firsthand the paralyzing effects of trying to follow Cassian’s
advice, criticizes it for promoting simulata confessio, “exag-
gerated guilt,” in his Steps of Humility (Bernard, 1964:
216–20). In his own penitential handbook (composed ca.
1175), Alain de Lille follows suit, soothing the overly precise
conscience of his fellow monks with these words: “But he
ought not always to descend to minutiae, . . . for truly a
searching after the unknown can give occasion for sin because
he who blows his nose too much brings forth blood” (Haer-
ing, 1963: 162–63). Raymund de Pennafort (1175–1275)
agrees. Being overly zealous in displaying one’s infirmities to
the spiritual physician, he says, “is not speaking the truth.”
Rather, it is “admitting falsely for the sake of humility.” “As
Augustine says, ‘if it was not a sin before confession, it is
now’” (Bryan and Dempster, 1958).
Both Alain and Raymund insist that while omitting no
mortal sin, confession must nevertheless exclude acts that the
penitent themselves does not know for certain are sinful.
Church doctrine, however, has by no means been clear on this
point. In the same paragraph where he cautions against false
humility, Raymund warns against a confession that is too gen-
eral. For while one can comprehend sin in general by confess-
ing particulars, the opposite is not true. Indeed, as early as the
seventh century, Gregory the Great was declaring, “it is a
mark of good souls . . . to recognize a fault where there is
none” (Ignatius, 1964: 137). St. Donatus (who flourished ca.
592–651 CE) was even more insistent: “Confession must be

always rendered assiduously and with unceasing zeal, alike of
thought, of the idle word, every hour, every moment. . . .
Accordingly not even little matters of thought are to be
neglected from confession, because it is written, ‘he who
neglects little things, falls little by little’” (Watkins, 1920: II,
621, 619). (Even the contemporary moral theologian, Haer-
ing, admits that scrupulosity can be “a critical stage in . . . reli-
gious growth.”)
Pope Benedict XI in 1303 enjoined the confession of
venial (minor) sins as a “great benefit” (Denzinger,1957: 188,
sec. 470). Although this was abrogated by the Council of
Vienne eight years later, the Church continued to hold that it is
better to err on the side of caution by confessing too much,
than failing to be absolved for minor misdeeds and “not enter
the gate of Life.” The Council of Trent (1551), responding to
the scathing attack on confession by one of Christian history’s
most notable obsessive-compulsives, Martin Luther, upheld
this recommendation.4
Venial sins, the bishops concluded, may
be safely “passed over in silence.” However, they added, “the
practice of pious persons” suggests that they can be confessed
rightfully and profitably” (Denzinger, 1957: 275–76, sec. 899).
This is hardly less than an admonition to scrupulosity for those
wishing their piety to be officially acknowledged.
Thomas Tentler cites some commentators (among them,
Antonino of Florence and Jean Gerson) who warned that “if a
scrupulous man were to confess all those things that have been
written for confessions, he well might keep a confessor in his
purse” (Tentler, 1977: 114). But he adds that such caveats are
rare (115–16, 156–62). Already by the time of Alain de Lille,
some handbooks were urging that penitents keep written
records of their sins, their companions in vice, their addresses,
and their occupations, all as mnemonic aids in preparing full
confessions. Later manuals would recommend that penitents
actually bring notes with them to their interrogations (Tentler,
1977: 86; Zimmerman, 1971: 124). This, although Pope Leo X
(1513–15) warned against the danger of reciting “individual
sins written in little books.” It is but a short distance from sim-
ple counts of wrongdoing to the finely sculpted, self-abasing

confessional autobiographies of the medieval period: those
authored by Julian of Norwich (1343–1413?), for example,
and Catherine of Siena (1347–1380).
Confession and Accounting
As the personal account of their spiritual development was to
the medieval poet and mystic, the financial account was to their
more worldly counterparts, the urban merchant and the rural
estate manager. In fact, a popular allegory used in period liter-
ature to depict the sacrament of confession was precisely that
of a “wicked steward” giving an “account” of his misdeeds to
the “bailiff” of the manor who serves as agent for the divine
“Auditor.”
But thou must abide in the house of thy heart pondering well
and examining all thy faults of which thou shall yield account
and answer to God and to his bailiff (that is, thy father-con-
fessor). And thou shall think also on thyself, as does he that
is required to yield account of his receipts and of his dispenses
to his lord. Wherefore every man and woman shall ponder his
sins straight-forwardly and look well to the stirrup of his con-
science, so that it does not fail in the count. For even if thou
fails at thy account, God will not fail at His when he cometh.
(Francis, 1968 [1942]: 173–74, my translation)
Today, of course, business records are comprised largely
of figures and dates. This is a far cry from the spiritual autobi-
ographies of a Francesco Petrarch or a Margery Kempe. It is
therefore difficult to appreciate that originally there might have
been something more than just a figurative parallel between
business chronicling and moral confession. As an aid in this
effort, I offer the following points.
First of all, like biographical accounts generally, medieval
business ledgers originally were not transcribed in tabular form,
but as complex sentences. Indeed, guild statutes of the day
expressly forbade bookkeepers from using Arabic notation and
columnar displays in posting accounts for fear that they could too

easily be falsified (Raymond de Roover, 1943: 150).5
According
to Armando Sapori, “not a few of the surviving [medieval
account] books . . . are so remarkable for beauty and aptness of
expression, for acuteness of observation, and for their wealth of
information that they have been published for their value as
philological texts” (Sapori, 1953: 56). In sum, then, the use or the
non-use of numbers and columns by themselves bear little on the
purposes served by an account. Business records can be preserved
in convoluted longhand; moral ledgers (as the cases of Cotton
Mather and Benjamin Franklin, to name just two, demonstrate)
can be tabulated and quantified (Sombart, 1967: 117–20).
Second, it also helps to keep in mind that like any
action—sex, politicking, or war-making—commerce is an
inherently moral enterprise, even if it is not always strictly eth-
ical. In other words, buying and selling are not just mindless
movements or “operants” (as Skinnerian psychologists might
say); they are conscious acts, behaviors made “meaningful” by
the reasons, stories, or accounts given for and about them
(Arrington and Francis, 1993). This being so, commerce natu-
rally and easily fell under the jurisdiction of the medieval
Church’s confessional regime. And as this occurred, business
narratives began assuming an apologetic, justificatory voice; to
the point that the information reported in them eventually
came to comport exactly to that routinely solicited by priests in
the course of their confessional inquiries: Who took part in the
transaction? What goods or services were involved? Where did
it take place? When? Why? And how much money was
involved? I will return to the significance of this fact later.
Third and finally. Perhaps not unexpectedly, then, after
1300 a species of moral obsession regarding private business
dealings began to make an appearance within the merchant
class. This is reflected in the increasingly shrill insistence on the
part of period commentators that merchants and bankers keep
tidy and comprehensive daybooks and ledgers, in which they
“note day by day and hour by hour even the minutiae of trans-
actions . . . never spar[ing] pen and ink” (Raymond and Lopez,
1955: 376–77). It is in this context that the moral—psychologi-
cal significance of double-entry bookkeeping is best understood.

Medieval Double-entry Bookkeeping
Double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) first appeared in several Ital-
ian cities simultaneously (Raymond de Roover, 1955; Florence
de Roover, 1956; Chatfield, 1974: 13–16). Its first documented
use is in the Massari accounts of Genoa (Melis, 1950: 527).
(These may be anticipated by fragments from the secret books
[libro segreti] kept by the Florentine banking family of Alberti,
to hide papal debtors [Raymond de Roover, 1955; Florence de
Roover, 1956].) The Massari books—so named after the word
for city treasury officials—date from 1327 when, according to
its devisors, a new system was introduced “after the mode of
banks,” perhaps to avert fraud. At the time, the municipality of
Genoa was speculating in pepper, sugar, silk, and wax.
Over the next two centuries, the procedure was dissemi-
nated to northern European trade centers. The vehicle that is
said to have “launched the future” was publication of the first
textbook on DEB, Particularis de Computis et Scripturis in
1494. Authored by the Franciscan friar and mathematician,
Luca Pacioli (1445–1517), it was one of the first books ever
printed on the Gutenberg press and, behind the Bible, one of
the most influential.1
Indeed, the invention of movable type
and the popularity of the “Italian method” were probably
linked. Printing visually demonstrated how business records
could be tidily aligned in bilateral format and concisely quan-
tified, and how different kinds of accounts—cash, expenses,
liabilities, assets, and so forth—could be distinguished. In
short, printing promoted the kind of thinking that DEB exem-
plifies (Thompson, 1991; Mills, 1994). While today account-
ing usually is performed by electronic computer, five hundred
31
C H A P T E R 4
Business Scruples

years after its publication, Particularis de Computis et Scrip-
turis still describes its basic procedures. It was modernity’s
first calculative technology.
To decipher the motives that might have occasioned the
emergence of DEB, it is necessary at the outset to assess first
how it was used. I will be brief. As ancient Sumerian clay
tablets and (what we know of them) Roman business records
clearly demonstrate, permanent, complicated partnerships in
credit, trade, and real estate can be conducted successfully
without DEB. In fact, according to Basil Yamey, “it is probable
that the vast majority of enterprises used a simple form of
record-keeping (which may conveniently be called ‘single-
entry’) until well into the nineteenth century . . .” (Yamey,
1949: 105). Even immense corporations like the Dutch East
India Company, the Sun Fire Insurance Office of London
(1701–1960), the Whitin Machine Company, and the Capital
and Counties Bank of England (until 1918) posted their
accounts in single-entry (1964: 126). The implication of this is
obvious: The popular argument that the “explosive” business
climate of late medieval Italy somehow “demanded,” “necessi-
tated,” “pressured,” or was “ripe for” DEB (Littleton, 1933:
15; Mills, 1994: 83, 89; Bryer, 1993)—is far from a sufficient
explanation for its appearance, however accurate it may be in
other respects. Even less convincing is the notion that DEB is
“rooted in the nature of things” (Raymond de Roover, 1955:
45; Chatfield, 1974: 32–43).2
Second and more to the point, Yamey argues that while
DEB definitely can be used to draw up periodic profit/loss
reports by which businesses can then rationally adjust their
behavior, evidently it was rarely used for this purpose until long
after its introduction. What this implies is that the claim that
DEB was “eagerly adopted” because its “superiority as a man-
agement tool was quickly recognized” is highly suspect at best.
Instead, as evidenced by the instructions contained in early book-
keeping texts, the act of posting each transaction twice in the
ledger, as a credit to one account and as a debit to another, was
superseded by other considerations: “Firstly [to quote an early
German textbook] so that the balances of all the . . . accounts

may be conveniently reviewed at once; and secondly and chiefly,
to prove that the books have been kept with accuracy” (Yamey,
1949: 110, my italics).
Neither the bilancio del libro (the book balance) nor the
summa summarum (known today as the trial balance [Pera-
gallo,1956]), which Pacioli extols as the two essential book-
keeping operations, have little purpose other than to certify the
accuracy of business records. The bilancio tests to make sure
that ledger postings comport with their corresponding journal
entries. (Pacioli provides elaborate procedures to guarantee
that this is the case [Pacioli, 1963: 91–92].) The second proce-
dure, the summa summarum (literally, sum of sums), compares
the total credits with the total debits in the ledger itself, to reas-
sure the bookkeeper that no errors have been made in it. Luca
Pacioli considers this the pivotal accounting operation. If the
two totals do not equate to the penny, then a mistake has been
made either in arithmetic or in the postings themselves. Such
errors “must be searched out diligently with the intellectual
ability God has given you” (98).
The bilancio del libro and the summa summarum were to
be undertaken whenever a ledger was about to be “closed,” and
its open accounts transferred to a new ledger, not as is done
today, according to a periodic schedule. While “in the best
known places,” says Pacioli (Pacioli, 1963: 91), closings are done
annually and while this can serve to “maintain lasting friend-
ships” among business partners (87), the main reason he gives
for closing a ledger is when there is no space in it for additional
postings. (Subsequent commentators would later add two other
conditions: when the owner ceased business or when he himself
died [Winjum, 1970: 750, 751, 760; Yamey, 1949: 104].) Pacioli
never directly states that the drawing of balances is undertaken
to enable owners to calculate profits so that they can rationally
adjust their affairs to market conditions or to determine the
investors’ shares of the firm’s equity. Instead, the “ordering
process” involved in ledger-closing “was considered more impor-
tant . . . than the income figure which resulted from it” (Win-
jum,1970: 750). (James Winjum goes on to agree with Yamey
that this was the case with most companies until around 1840.)
33Business Scruples

This is not to say that matters of profit/loss and capital are
overlooked in early bookkeeping texts. On the contrary, one of
the advertised features of DEB from the beginning was that it
enabled owners to get an overall view of their estate at a single
glance and to “reform their measures of living” accordingly
(Winjum, 1970: 746–47; Yamey, 1949: 101–2). Pacioli, for
example, explicitly acknowledges that “some people keep an
account called Income and Expense” from which they assess
their profits and losses (Pacioli, 1963: 80). At one point, he
even prays that “God may protect each of us who is really a
good Christian from” financial losses (97). Nevertheless, it is
clear that for Pacioli assessments of profit/loss and capital are
secondary to the major object of bookkeeping which, to repeat
myself, is to relate the story of the firm’s dealings meticulously,
thoroughly, and accurately. Nor is this the case for just Pacioli.
The terms that he and other period authors use to describe the
postings from which profit/loss is determined underscore its
marginality. Consisting of a “hotchpotch” of such items as
money received from dowries, gambling winnings (and losses),
and household expenses, they are variously dismissed as
“chaff,” “refuse and dregs,” and “fictitious.” In short, they are
items cast into “a convenient receptacle” with others that have
no where else to go (Winjum, 1970: 750; Yamey, 1949: 107,
109). The “real,” “pertinent,” “essential” accounts are those
that are about to be transferred to the new ledger (Pacioli,
1963: 80, 96).3
To say it once more, then, until late in the eigh-
teenth century at the earliest, the most important objective of
bookkeeping was not to aid partnerships to maximize profit or
to calculate capital. It was instead, says Winjum, to satisfy an
“obsession” by bookkeepers with precision and comprehen-
siveness for themselves.
Alberti, Pacioli, and Datini
What might have occasioned such an obsession? Or, if one
prefers a less psychiatric vocabulary: What lay behind a shift in
business orientation toward what Werner Sombart calls

Rechenhaftikeit (arithmetic reckoning), a quality so clearly
exemplified by DEB?
Without getting into the convoluted history of Western
science, a clue is provided by sociologist Benjamin Nelson in
the following homey adage: numbers don’t lie (Nelson, 1981:
152–63). Although cynics might doubt it, numbers are less eas-
ily fabricated than the tongue’s slippery words. Having a uni-
versal character, furthermore, their meanings can be deciphered
by anyone of any culture trained to read them, requiring no
special, charismatic gifts. Numbers are more reliable than the
intuitive conjectures of theologians and the personal revela-
tions of prophets; more trustworthy than the probabilistic con-
jectures of moral casuists who hear the confessions of bewil-
dered penitents.4
“Probabilities of perplexed and doubtful
consciences [therefore] give way to [numbers] which have the
appearance of precision and which . . . offer . . . mathematically
certain demonstrations of the need for one or another policy”
(250). As applied to the issue before us, arithmetically precise
bookkeeping promised objective certitude in the face of the
subjective risks and uncertainties of late medieval commerce.
The penitent’s circumstantially detailed, quantified moral
ledger aided them to represent their life to their confessors
according to a simple yet thorough narrative, and helped them
trace their moral progress or regress, if not by the week at least
annually. Just so, as a “kind of Ariadne’s silken thread [DEB]
Conducts [merchants] through the Labyrinths of trade . . . like
Theseus it doth devour confusion that monstrous minotaure”
(Colinson, 1638: forward): “the confusion of Babel” wherein
the merchant’s mind “has no rest” and is “always troubled” (cf.
Pacioli, 1963: 26; Sapori, 1953: 55–56; Raymond and Lopez,
1955: 376–77; Origo, 1957: 98, 113; Yamey, 1949: 102–3).
“For what is a man when his accounts are all in confusion,”
asks an early advocate of DEB, “but like a ship in a boisterous
sea without mast or rudder, which cannot be expected but to
sink or run aground. But if accounts be kept regular, there will
be a great safety and satisfaction therein” (Winjum, 1970: 745).
Insistence on the necessity of arithmetically chronicling
the affairs of one’s household and firm, “to the point of bad
35Business Scruples

taste” (to quote one critic), is no where more evident than in
the cases of Pacioli, Leon Battista Alberti, and Francesco
Datini, three Tuscan luminaries. Each in their own way con-
tributed to the idea, taken for granted today, that the entire
universe—including the movements of planets, architectural
structures, human physiology, and business reality—is best rep-
resented by mathematics.
᪌᪍
The most celebrated of the three, Alberti (1404–72), was the
last scion of the renown Florentine banking family of that
name: philosopher, architect, musician, and sculptor. His views
on numerical record-keeping are important not because they
are uncharacteristically extreme for his time—they are not—
but because of the intimate relationship with and influence he
appears to have had on Pacioli.5
To Alberti, business records are never to be dismissed as
profane throwaways. On the contrary, “it is almost as if they
[are] sacred or religious objects” (Alberti, 1971: 218). As such,
diligence and solicitousness in their care “is as acceptable to
God” as frequent prayer and daily attendance at Mass. Nor is
the registering of one’s business affairs something to be done
when spare time allows or is farmed out to underlings for the
sake of more important tasks. Instead, Alberti believes that the
merchant has no less than an ethical “duty . . . to write every-
thing down [himself] . . . and to check everything so often that
it seems he is always with pen in hand” (205). “I should often
want to examine and verify even the smallest matters,” he once
boasted, “at times even inquiring about things already known
to us, so that I should seem more diligent. . . . Benedetto Alberti
used to say that the Merchant should always have his fingers
stained with ink” (205).
It is a revealing comment on his fastidiousness that Alberti
appears sensitive to charges that his advice smacks of something
not completely healthy. Cognizant that he has, perhaps, waxed
too eloquently enthusiastic on these matters, he cautions read-
ers that conscientiousness should not go so far as “seeing if the
lamps have too thick a wick. . . .” Tasks like these, he suggests,
are best left to women (Alberti, 1971: 215–16).

Like his mentor, Pacioli also lauds the virtues of wakeful-
ness, sobriety, and industry. In Particularis de Computis et
Scripturis, he writes that the good manager is now here, now
there; sometimes in the shop, sometimes at the market, and at
still other times with the owner at fairs, while the shop is left
in the hands of women “who can scarcely write” (Pacioli,
1963: 34). Alert as the rooster who keeps nightly vigils in all
seasons without rest, he has “a hundred eyes” to oversee his
enterprise. “Yet [even] these are not enough for all [he has] to
say or do” (33). To facilitate vigilance and to clear his mind of
less important matters, the manager should therefore keep
memorandums, journals, and ledgers that are clear, complete,
and cross-referenced.
Pacioli is not content to justify his advice by promising
greater profits to those who follow it, any more than Alberti is.
Profit is mentioned only occasionally, and then primarily as an
aside in the course of his discussion of the summa summarum.
Instead, vigilance and the bookkeeping that enables it, consti-
tute nothing less than cardinal virtues, ends in themselves. “In
the divine offices of the Holy Church, they sing that God
promised a crown to the watchful” (Pacioli, 1963: 34). The
sine qua non of good business, Pacioli argues, is the habit of
arranging one’s affairs in a “systematic way,” which is to say,
with mathematical proficiency (25–26). Risk-taking and long-
range planning are nowhere mentioned.
The reader may object that neither Alberti nor Pacioli are
representative of the average Italian businessperson of their times
and that it is unfair to generalize from their outlook to that of the
typical merchant. Both men were unusually gifted and refined
humanists. Pacioli, for example, was an acclaimed professor of
mathematics and a friend to the younger Leonardo da Vinci. For
his part, Alberti’s sculptures and buildings are still looked upon as
signal examples of Renaissance art. This objection could be sus-
tained, then, were it not for the writings of a far less perceptive
wool merchant whose dispositions toward record-keeping are
even more fanatic than Alberti’s or Pacioli’s: Francesco di Marco
Datini (1335–1400) a man who “epitomizes” Tuscan character,
according to his biographer (Origo, 1957: xvi).
37Business Scruples

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